At Home And On The Road

Dane Cook is a comedian for these American Idol times: youthful, accessible and karaoke-good. His dead-on rendition of an exciting new headliner (circa 20 years ago), coupled with Brad Pitt looks (for a comic) and Internet savvy (www.myspace.com/danecook, with his 1,138,772 "friends"), propelled him into a development deal with HBO, a relationship whose latest outing, premiering Sunday night, is Tourgasm.

Tourgasm is a reality-type show in which Cook -- who is likable and high energy, but unspectacular to anyone who's watched much comedy in the last two decades -- goes on the road in a rock-star bus with three lesser lights. It's the Sunday nightcap in a block of new comedies that includes the third-season debut of Entourage and the premiere of the sitcom Lucky Louie, starring another comedian, Louis C.K., who previously wrote for Late Night With Conan O'Brien and The Chris Rock Show.

If Tourgasm is steeped in VH1, Entourage and Lucky Louie exude that old HBO counter-network-intuitiveness, at different extremes: Entourage is basically Friends with Hummers, while Lucky Louie attempts to repudiate all that Friends did to the sitcom in the first place.

Lucky Louie, about a young couple with honest money troubles, is harshly lighted, and it has the studio audience and laugh track; it feels as if you've happened across a British sitcom or a rerun of MADtv.

Louie is a part-time mechanic in a muffler shop, and his wife, Kim (Pamela Adlon, the voice of Bobby on King of the Hill), is a full-time hospital nurse. The supporting cast of misfits, used unevenly so far, are unwashed types normally relegated to guest-star status (Michael G. Hagerty, for instance, was the occasionally seen apartment superintendent on Friends, but here he's Louie's best friend who cracks weary-wise and smokes cigarettes).

Kim takes the bus to work, and Louie wears T-shirts that have shrunk and faded in the laundry. The sets on Louie suggest a decaying burg -- doughnut shop, fenced-in playground, check-cashing place.

This all makes it a rarity, socioeconomically; most network shows, post-Roseanne, uniformly abandoned portrayals of the lower-middle class -- the expression "blue collar" becoming network shorthand for anything that wasn't like Frasier. Louie recalls the era of Sanford and Son, All in the Family and Good Times.

Louie's opening scene is an intentionally stock network sitcom tableau: kewpie-doll kid, sardonic dad are at breakfast, the 4-year-old Lucy (Kelly Gould) peppering her father with cute-as-a-button inquisitiveness, questions ranging from why is it still dark outside to why didn't dad pay attention in school.

The first answer ("the Earth goes around, and when it turns a certain amount the sun shows on the horizon") sets up the comic release of the second one ("Because I was high all the time. I smoked too much pot").

Although the show, being on pay-cable, is free to use profanity and explicit sexual references, it's actually pretty judicious (when Louie refers to his wife's privates, the actual word is less funny than its metaphor as "a chamber of financial ruin"). In the pilot, Kim catches Louie masturbating, which leads to a renewed commitment to have sex, which leads to Louie discovering Kim wants to get pregnant again.

"Do you know how much we have in checking? Negative $50," Louie tells her about the risks of bearing another child. "We have to raise $50 just to be broke."

More than the raunch -- which keeps migrating to broadcast, anyway -- this is what makes Lucky Louie interesting. It dares to utter that eight-letter word: "checking."

Tourgasm takes place in an America we don't see, either, but this is because we're locked inside a bus with four guys mugging at a hand-held camera. It's Entourage on the cheap, without the fun stuff -- Ari's showy rants or Drama's neediness -- and with even less at stake.

The comics that make up Dane Cook's touring posse -- Jay Davis, Gary Gulman and Robert Kelly -- convey the same airborne sense of sponging off of a star that Vince's buds exude. Off the bus, they play with toys; on the bus, they sleep, break wind and discuss porn. Here's what HBO hates to hear: It's been done before, and funnier, on Comedy Central's Comedians of Comedy, for one.